Jazz for a Rainy Day

Tuesday it rained. Sometimes it stopped, but other times it kept raining. Mostly it rained. So, obviously, it was this most glorious of days Adam and I set forth to get our bearings on the city, particularly the northern end, and check out a few museums and figure out the location of the Moulin de la Galette, one of the sites we are researching.

Our first destination was Sacre Coeur, a massive cathedral constructed in the early to mid 19^th century just a few blocks from our hostel. Step after step, stair after stair we ascended the staircases towards our destined peak, the Basilica of Paris, with its vaulted roofs and magnificent stained glass. We were very impressed by the solemn glory of the gothic masterpiece and walked around the cathedral with the other tourists, in awe of the various statues and paintings hung near all the altars, indeed we were rendered silent by the might of the building itself and its commanding orientation at the peak of Paris. After surveying the Parisian vista for minutes on end we decided to descend from the mount and explore the rest of Montmartre while searching for the Moulin de la Galette.

The Moulin de la Galette served as a mill from about 1620 until 1873, at which time the family’s remaining son turned the site into one of Paris’s epicenters for elite, artsy soirées. It was the site of the Parisian Alamo, with the last of four brothers dying in one of the wings of the windmill while fighting “tooth and nail” (as the placard put it in French) against the invading Prussians. The man who turned the Moulin de la Galette into the hipster spot in Paris for Renoir, Van Gogh, et al was the son of that very brave last Brother, family name Debray. There is a famous painting of the interior gardens of the Moulin de la Galette by Renoir, but since the property is now a private residence except for a restaurant on the corner with its own windmill to attract ignorant tourists, and because our project deals with landscapes, we chose to focus on a slightly lesser known painting by Van Gogh of the buildings exterior and surrounding neighborhood. So, we found it, and moved along in pursuit of the Musee Nissim and Musee Moreau—sloshing through puddle after puddle of rain along the way. Actually, to be perfectly honest, I was jumping into them.

I discovered these two museums while reading a book about an American man’s twenty years spent in Paris titled The Flaneur. The Musee Moreau houses a collection of paintings, stained glass, drawings, and sculptures by Gustav Moreau, a contemporary and close friend of the poet Charles Baudelaire. Moreau once accused Baudelaire of attempting to change the world through flowers in his poetry. Baudelaire responded to Moreau questioning how he planned to change the world through paintings of jewelry. Gustav Moreau, to the best of my knowledge, was gay and loved both jewelry and the end of the world. These fascinations are equally represented through many of his works of art.

The Musee Nissim was established because of a daughter’s promise to her dying and severely depressed father. After bearing two children, his wife ran off with an Italian stableboy never to be seen again and as a result the newly-found bachelor became obsessed with collecting impressionist and neo-impressionist art and spent most of his family’s fortune amassing work after work by the likes of Monet, Manet, and Pissarro. After his son died as a pilot in the first World War he became a recluse and refused to speak with anyone except museum curators and his daughter. Just before he died, he told his daughter he wished to have a museum constructed to display his private holdings named in honor of his son. The museum was finally completed in 1935 under his daughter’s supervision. Sadly, because of the family’s Jewish heritage and despite their standing in French high society, the daughter and her family were all taken to Auschwitz in 1942 where they died along with the family’s name.

To get back on track, we worked our way westward from the Moulin de la Galette over to the Musee Nissim only to find it closed, with Adam and I left standing in the rain, two against nature. Luckily, the Parc Monceau was nearby with a nice little shelter to shield us from the rain. We took full advantage of this structure, ate the remains of our delicious English cakes prepared by none other than Lady Erica of Buckhurst Hill, and soon enjoyed the engulfing company of thirty or so Parisian high school children all on their lunch break and itching to both escape the confines of their educational prison and the buckets of rain falling from the sky. Because of the wonderful company/crowd under our hut Adam and I soon departed and began to navigate our way towards the Musee Moreau, which, upon arrival, we discovered to also be closed.

Thus it was that we discovered one of the great truths of Paris: all museums are closed on Tuesdays, and if not on Tuesday then for sure on Monday. Feeling that we had thoroughly wasted a day we decided to be true flaneurs and wander around Paris without a mission or a goal, which led us to the river Seine, which we strolled along for some time while marveling at the grand buildings on the Ile de la Cite, especially Notre Dame, which towers over its neighbors. Our loop then brought us back to the right bank to see the Centre Georges Pompidou, which houses the Museum of Modern Art, which was closed (mais bien sur!), but the unique inside-out design of the building is still worthwhile even from the plaza in front, becquae while the water pipes, heating ducts, and electricity wires are on the external surface of the building, the interior space is left free and open for virtually any purpose.

Later that night, after a homecooked meal of pasta and a baguette, word got round of a neighborhood jazz club jam session. Being quite the connoisseurs of jazz, Adam and I decided to check this place out. The club was a stone’s throw from the Moulin Rouge, in the heart of Paris’s red light district, but easily the most low-key street on the block. The jazz club was below the bar, in a sort of cave. Within minutes it became much more than a cave, transforming into a veritable cavern of treasure filled with mellifluous voices and some of the most cohesive jazz I’ve seen live and in such an intimate setting. Most songs were actually sung in English, despite a predominately French audience (15 of the 20 people in attendance), with interspersed periods of authentic scat. Requests were summoned and I gladly asked to hear “Corcovado” a song made famous by Tom Jobim, Stan Getz, and Astrud Gilberto during the height of Brazil’s bossa nova movement. The night lasted for hours, and without a cover charge at the door the prices of drinks seemed very reasonable, so it was that the music and reveling continued until the wee hours of the morning, at which point a need for sleep began to take precedence over a need for more music and it was time to retreat to a moth-eaten bed with itchy sheets and an obese, snoring Indian man as bunkmate.